Before the advent of the wavefront aberrometer, many patients' visual symptoms were collectively referred to as a result of “irregular astigmatism”. Increasingly, more opthalmologists and optometrists have begun measuring wavefront errors of patients' eye. A wealth of information is now available, that was not heretofore, from auto-refractor or cornea topography measurements. Use of a wavefront map as a diagnosis tool is also gaining popularity, and vision care professionals use it to explain diagnoses to patients having visual complaints.
It is useful to understand the source of a problem. However, patients are most interested in solutions; such as getting rid of visual complaints, and improving their quality of vision. Currently, laser refractive surgery, such as LASIK, is one possible solution. However, laser surgery is invasive and the tissue healing process following surgery can induce its own set of aberrations, often rendering an attempt to correct the pre-operation errors fruitless. It has been proposed to correct high order aberrations (HOA) with non-invasive devices such as spectacles or contact lenses.
It was proposed in US application 2004/0160576A1, which is hereby incorporated by reference, to identify high order wavefront errors with a patient feedback control process. However, lacking in that disclosure is the basis for a patient to adjust each of the wavefront components. The '160576 application does disclose use of visual acuity as a measure to find an end point. As it was pointed out in the '160576 application, an acuity chart, or Snellen letter chart, is not an ideal target for wavefront optimization. More importantly, no method is presented regarding how a patient may choose which Zernike function to vary among the dozens of Zernike functions, without which the patient would have to go on a random walk, using by trial and error on all or substantially all of the Zernike functions. Without a clear step by step procedure, a patient may not even be able to find an optimal sphere, cylinder and axis, much less the high order Zernike components, wherein the effect of those aberrations on acuity is much smaller. The patient might get totally lost in the process, and it might take hours to come to any final optimized combination, if it ever got there at all.